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The boys of summer are back. Some in pinstripes, some in full-metal jackets and some in full James Franco. This is the season when studios seek a home-run hitter who can fill the seats from June to fall. With a roster of veteran sluggers competing for glory with some noted rookies rising from the minors, this year’s lineup makes the multiplex a veritable field of movie dreams. (Opening dates are subject to change.)

Ho, ho, ho-hum. The holiday season has turned into a matter of Hobbit, with the predictably ambitious Oscar contenders pacing the green room awaiting their bows and the seat-holders looking for a window of opportunity.

Win Butler remembers the day everything changed. He and his wife, Arcade Fire bandmate Régine Chassagne, were in her homeland of Haiti together for the first time, exploring the countryside. They met a farmer, who sang them a song he wrote.

The Gatekeepers: Four stars out of five (4/5) — To bomb, or not to bomb: That is the question haunting the talking heads in Dror Moreh’s Oscar-nominated documentary, The Gatekeepers. For the first time in history, Moreh interviewed the former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service in charge of homeland defence. And what he gets on camera isn’t just revelatory, it’s almost revolutionary as they confess to doubt, mistakes and a formal, amoral stance on anti-terrorist measures. They say things we might naturally assume — such as “forget morality” — but never quite expect to hear out loud and on the record. It’s the matter-of-factness of it all that makes The Gatekeepers so compelling. You just never know what you’re going to hear next as the movie demystifies every shred of conspiracy theory, fear-mongering and looming terrorist threat that’s pre-occupied much of the popular psyche for decades. Despite the explosive complexities of the Middle East, Moreh manages to create a cohesive and emotional narrative through a minefield of ancient and recent history by forcing the viewer to dig at the unspoken moral arguments buried under every war. Special features include commentary and Q&A with Moreh.

Four pretty young women — two of them grown-up Disney stars whose appearance in and out of bikinis represents a kind of cultural perversion, as if Mickey Mouse were cast in a porn film — decide to leave their boring college town and go to Florida for spring break. They don’t have money, so they rob the local Chicken Shack, terrorizing customers with fake guns. They arrive to a bacchanal of beer, drugs, toplessness and the kind of aggressive sexual posing that make you think Dante could have set a whole new circle of hell at a motel pool in St. Petersburg.

Cody Sylvester must have gotten a little hoarse from thanking so many individuals on Sunday afternoon in the Fairmont Palliser’s Crystal Ballroom. But really, it’s the Calgary Hitmen who should be thanking their lucky stars for this talented and inspirational 20-year-old.

Phillip Huber grew up in Illinois, not too far from the mythical Kansas of Dorothy’s Wizard of Oz, but that didn’t prepare the puppeteer for the first day of shooting Oz: The Great and Powerful in Pontiac, Michigan. Huber, one of the headline performers in the lineup of this year’s International Festival of Animated Objects, got a puppeteering gig on the $325 million Disney film, which stars James Franco, Michelle Williams and Mila Kunis, and opens Friday.

Sliding into the briny basin of Great Salt Lake like an annual avalanche of glacial liberalism, this year’s Sundance Film Festival will once again offer movies about sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. But alongside Amanda Seyfried’s turn as porn star Linda Lovelace and James Franco’s experimental ode to leather bars, the Park City wingding that kicks off Thursday will also feature a few Canadian efforts that highlight different human truths.